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YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory
(JTA) — Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama.
A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon” whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came at the expense of her husband’s.
As Max explains in his 2008 memoir, “From Schlub to Stud,” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protectiveness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish writers was serious business: Because Inna Grade kept such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers — Chaim Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982 — a generation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure.
Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx apartment became the property of the borough’s public administrator. In 2013, Chaim Grade’s personal papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on Manhattan’s W. 16th Street.
This week YIVO and the NLI will announce the completion of the digitization of “The Papers of Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade,” making the entire archive publicly accessible online. When the folks at YIVO invited me to come and look at the Grade collection, I knew I had to invite Max, not just because of his connection to Inna Grade but because he has become a critically acclaimed novelist in his own right: His 2020 novel “The Lost Shtetl,” which imagines a Jewish village in Poland that has somehow escaped the Holocaust, is in many ways an homage to the Yiddish literary tradition.
We met on Thursday with the YIVO staff, who were tickled by the T-shirt Max was wearing, which had a picture of Chaim Grade and the phrase “Grade is my homeboy.” (Max said his wife bought it for him, although neither could imagine the market for such a shirt.)
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, and novelist Max Gross discuss a thick file containing news clippings relating to the late Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade at YIVO’s Manhattan offices, Feb. 2, 2023. (New York Jewish Week)
The Grade papers — manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, lectures, speeches, essays — are stored in folders in gray boxes, whose neatness belies the years of effort that went into putting them in order. Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO, described for us the Grades’ apartment, which he visited shortly after Inna’s death.
“It was like a combination of my grandmother’s apartment and a writer’s home,” he said. “Everything was books, books to the ceiling. You open a drawer in the kitchen where you think there’ll be knives and forks, there are books, there are manuscripts. You open the cabinet in the bathroom, there are more manuscripts and books and books…. But the thing I remember most is that at the top of a shelf there was that much dust.” He held his fingers about two inches apart.
Inna Grade was Chaim Grade’s second wife. The writer was born in Vilna (now in Lithuania) in 1910. He was able to flee east during the Nazi occupation, leaving behind his mother and his first wife under the assumption that the Germans would only target adult men. It was a tragic miscalculation, and their deaths would haunt Grade the rest of his life. Inna Hecker was born in Ukraine in 1925, and met Grade in Moscow during the war. Married in 1945, they immigrated to the United States in 1948.
Chaim Grade had already established a reputation as a poet, playwright and prose stylist before the war; English translations of his novels “The Agunah” and “The Yeshiva” and serial publication of his novels in the Yiddish press brought him recognition in America for what the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse calls a “Dostoyevskian talent to animate in fiction the destroyed Talmudic civilization of Europe.” Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber, in a YIVO release, says that Grade was possessed “by the spirit of the yeshiva world he’d left behind; then possessed by the spirits and memories of those who’d been murdered by the Nazis.”
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, showed us the physical evidence of that possession: Grade’s notebooks, in which he wrote down ideas and inspiration in a careful Yiddish script; manuscripts for at least two unpublished dramatic works, “The Dead Can’t Rise Up” and “Hurban” (“Sacrifice”); a photograph of Grade standing amidst the ruins of Vilna during his only visit after the war; pictures of the Bronx apartment taken when the couple was still alive, book-filled but still tidy.
Halpern also showed us the Yiddish typewriter recovered from the apartment, with what is believed to be the last page he worked on still rolled in its platen.
Chaim Grade’s typewriter, preserved in the condition it was found when the Yiddish author died in 1982, contains what are apparently the last lines he ever wrote. (New York Jewish Week)
The archivists are also careful to give Inna her due. After arriving in America she studied literature and received a master’s degree from Columbia, and often translated her husband’s work. Thanks to her, hundreds of clippings of Grade’s work and articles about him have survived.
Her correspondence reflects the lengths she went to protect her husband’s legacy during and after his lifetime, including a bizarre and lengthy letter to the Vatican complaining about Singer. “She was a brilliant and creative person, devoted in a way only a widow can be,” said Brent. “And perhaps devoted to a maddening extent.”
If all that sounds like the stuff of Jewish fiction, it is: In 1969, Cynthia Ozick wrote a novella called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” about Yiddish writers very much like Grade consumed with envy for a writer very much like Singer. “They hated him for the amazing thing that had happened to him — his fame — but this they never referred to,” wrote Ozick. “Instead they discussed his style: his Yiddish was impure, his sentences lacked grace and sweep, his paragraph transitions were amateur, vile.”
Halpern showed us a mailgram from Inna to the Forward that makes it clear that she and her husband read and hated the story. In it she describes Ozick as “no less grotesque than evil.”
For all of the gothic Yiddish aspects of its retrieval, “this is probably the single most important literary acquisition in YIVO’s postwar history,” Brent said of the archive. He described publishing projects already underway with Schocken Books and other publishers that will draw on the material.
Max and I discussed what it felt like to see what had become “a bit of a joke” around the Forward office placed at the center of an epic exercise in literary preservation. Max was struck by the way Inna’s personality came through in the papers. “This was her,” he said. “Her obsession, her struggle, all these things. It was definitely remarkable to see that.”
I recalled overhearing his conversations with Inna, and how her behavior could seem funny and exasperating, but also admirable and more than a little sad — in that her devotion to her husband’s reputation may also have prevented scholars from doing the work that would have made him better known.
“Exactly, but that’s one of the reasons why you get into Yiddish literature, because all of these things are true at the same time,” said Max. “Those kinds of scores, rivalries, feuds within Yiddish literature is what is so great about it. It is great to see that somebody really cared and that literature was taken so seriously. And the pettiness was something you couldn’t quite divest from the rest of it.”
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German city bans stumbling stone memorials to Nazi victims
(JTA) — A decision to bar the “stumbling stone” memorials to victims of the Nazis has touched a nerve in one small German town, and beyond.
At issue is a motion – passed Sept. 25 by the city council of Heidenau in the former East Germany – to stop installation of such memorials in local sidewalks, calling them disrespectful, and to use the town’s North Cemetery instead.
Set into the ground, the small, engraved brass “Stolpersteine,” or stumbling stones, are meant to make pedestrians stop and think about the fate of former residents. There are currently some 116,000 such stones laid in 1,860 municipalities across Europe, mostly in Germany, according to the project’s website.
A curious aspect of the Stolpersteine is that they are opposed by both Germany’s right wing, which view them as detracting from national pride, and by a vocal minority of Jews who feel they don’t do enough to uplift the memory of victims.
The effort to block the memorial stones in Heidenau was sponsored jointly by the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The town’s current mayor, Conny Oertel, is independent.
The city council’s decision comes as the AfD gains support in German elections nationwide. The party’s support for banning the project in Heidenau has sparked concern about potential moves to suppress official public commemoration of the Holocaust.
The AfD is known for challenging Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance in general. Bjoern Hoecke, who leads the party in the neighboring state of Thuringia, once even called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame” that detracted from German pride. In protest, an artist collective built a replica of the memorial outside his home.
On the other hand, some Jews, albeit a minority, object to the memorials because they say it’s disrespectful to place them where they can be walked on and covered with leaves or trash. The stones have also been targets of vandelism, they note.
But the Heidenau motion is not for the sake of victims; rather it’s a “transparent maneuver by the extremists of the AfD” to suppress Germany’s remembrance culture, said Charlotte Knobloch, who has successfully opposed the placement of Stolpersteine in her home city of Munich, in the state of Bavaria.
“Removing places of remembrance from the cityscape, as has now happened in Heidenau, is absolutely the wrong approach,” said Knobloch, a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor, who heads the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria.
In a statement issued to the press Friday, Knobloch added that she was “appalled” that the CDU “would lend itself to supporting” the move. “The democratic center should and must find its way back to itself here and find a better solution.”
The joint opposition to the project by the AfD, the mainstream CDU and a local activist group creates a dilemma for Stolpersteine opponents like Knobloch who also abhor the AfD.
Heidenau, in the state of Saxony, is not the first town to act against the project. The city of Munich in Bavaria voted as early as 2004 not to allow the installation of the stones in public spaces, siding with Knobloch. In the city of Pulheim, in North Rhine-Westphalia, the project was blocked in 2011, but eventually the municipality reversed course and allowed the first installations to take place in 2022.
Heidenau is home to 17,000 people. Though the wartime local Jewish population was small, there are five such stones in the town already. An application for 12 more had been submitted by the Alternative Cultural and Educational Center (Akubiz), including for Fritz Goldstein and his wife Martha, who were expelled to Poland in 1938 and survived the war.
Arguing against the stones, the Heidenau motion noted that many citizens, relatives of victims, and activists actually disapprove of this form of commemoration.
Negative reactions to the decision in Heidenau were swift, both from proponents and detractors of the memorial concept itself.
In an email statement, the New York-based March of the Living educational organization called on the town of Heidenau “to reverse its decision and on Germany’s leaders and citizens to oppose every effort to hide this history.”
The city council decision “raises a deeply troubling question: Are political interests being allowed to push the memory of Nazi victims out of public life?” the statement read in part.
Like Knobloch, Munich resident Gabriella Meros doesn’t like the stumbling stones. “They are simply not a dignified way to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust,” said Meros, daughter of a Holocaust survivor and chair of the association Respect and Remember Europe.
She promotes placement of plaques on buildings instead.
But the political move in Heidenau by the CDU and AfD is “outrageous, because they’re exploiting this argument for their own purposes.”
The real problem is, she said, that the AfD “wants to abolish remembrance” itself.
In its platform, the AfD says it aims to promote “positive, identity-establishing aspects of German history.” Critics say that in practice, this could mean reducing funding for educational trips to Holocaust sites and for the memorial sites themselves.
The Stolpersteine project, initiated in 1992 by Cologne-based artist Gunter Demnig, sets engraved memorials into sidewalks in front of buildings where deported victims of the Nazi dictatorship once lived.
Usually, family members from around the world nominate sites and pay a nominal fee for materials. For many, the stumbling stones are a substitute for a grave, for ancestors whose place of death is unknown.
Israel’s Ambassador to Germany Ron Prosor wrote on X
that he was “ashamed” of Heidenau’s decision, noting that members of his own family who were forced to flee the Nazis were commemorated by the stones in Berlin.
“Every person has a name. A world. A story. It is precisely this memory that is being erased here. Whoever erases the victims from the past erases the past itself.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post German city bans stumbling stone memorials to Nazi victims appeared first on The Forward.
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‘NAZA’ documentary draws sold-out crowd – and protests – at US premiere
(JTA) — Even a powerful Nor’easter couldn’t stop the crowds from showing up at the North American premiere of the controversial Israeli documentary “NAZA” on Saturday afternoon.
The two weekend screenings scheduled at Lincoln Center as part of the New York Film Festival sold out in minutes. Dozens of people waited in a box office standby line that stretched around the corner despite the blustery conditions, while at least one local politician scored a ticket: Brad Lander, the Jewish progressive and Democratic nominee for New York’s 10th Congressional District.
Meanwhile, two groups of Israeli-Americans showed up on Saturday with no intention of going inside the theater: one demonstrating in solidarity with the filmmakers, and a larger group across the street that denounced the film as they waved Israeli flags.
The documentary, which was produced by The Guardian and alleges that Israeli forces knowingly killed large numbers of civilians in Gaza, has received early acclaim, winning the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival earlier this month. It will be made available for free on The Guardian’s website later this fall.
John Kwiatkowski, senior manager of publicity and communications for Film at Lincoln Center, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that “NAZA sold out almost immediately.”
But “NAZA,” whose name is the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage,” has also roiled a number of Israeli officials and the country’s military. The Israel Defense Forces issued a public rebuttal after the film’s reception in Venice, with the IDF chief of staff calling the film a “deliberate distortion of reality.”
The Israeli filmmakers, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, have faced intense backlash at home. Israel’s culture minister threatened to strip them of their citizenship and protesters accused the duo of treason in a demonstration outside Szor’s parents’ home.
Roni Tamari, who organized the rally supporting the filmmakers on Saturday, called the Israeli reaction “out of proportion.”
David Lawson, a Jewish Queens resident who had purchased a ticket for the Saturday premiere, told JTA that he’d appreciated Abraham and Szor’s previous film, “No Other Land,” which focused on settler violence in the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta.
Minutes before the screening’s slated start time, Lawson said that he was “very excited” to see “NAZA,” not just for what it will say “about Israel, but also just about the alarming use of AI in warfare in general.”
Lawson said he likes “to hope that the tide is shifting on acceptance of Zionism in the United States,” and that support for “NAZA” was an example of that shift. He also said he was “expecting” to see protesters who disagreed with the film. “Pathetic,” another person in line chimed in, describing the demonstration.
They were referring to the protest organized by the Israeli-American Council, which drew dozens of critics of the film who believe it omits the context of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack in its depiction of the IDF’s military campaign in Gaza. Speakers included IAC’s chief communities officer Noa Peri-Jensch and a pair of survivors of the Nova music festival that Hamas attacked.
A fleet of four black trucks circled the area with LED screens that displayed images of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack along with various messages. “Movies have editors. History does not,” one message read. The trucks were commissioned by the IAC.
“We mourn every innocent life lost in this war, Israeli or Palestinian,” Peri-Jensch said during the rally. “But compassion for Palestinian civilians does not require [us] to erase Oct. 7, ignore Hamas or accept one narrative without questioning it.”
Peri-Jensch was not calling for the film’s screenings to be canceled, she said in an interview, but rather for them to be paired “with context” at festivals, like panels featuring Oct. 7 survivors.
Asked about Israeli officials’ threats toward the filmmakers and the demonstrators calling them traitors, Peri-Jensch said she “cannot comment on what people in Israel do, I can only comment here,” adding that viewers “deserve to know the full scope.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backed legislation last week that would strip the Israeli filmmakers of their citizenship, while the Israeli army has weighed taking legal action against them.
Protesters gathered outside Szor’s parents’ home multiple nights in a row last week calling on authorities to “expel the traitors.” One speaker called for Abraham and Szor to be executed while the crowd chanted, “Execute the traitors.” Participants in the right-wing protest included activists and campaign staff from National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s far-right party, according to Haaretz.
On Saturday, Nova massacre survivor Rom El-Hai himself referred to the filmmakers as “traitors,” and said that there have been “liars” like Abraham and Szor within the Jewish community since the Bible and during the Holocaust.
In an interview following his remarks, El-Hai said it isn’t his job to say how exactly Abraham and Szor should be dealt with in Israeli society, but that they “should be punished” and that they cannot “live their life in Israel like nothing happened.”
“People need to understand there is a price for what they’re doing,” he said.
Near the standby line running along the sidewalk of Broadway, about a dozen demonstrators who are involved with the group Israelis for Peace held signs reading, “We stand by the countless victims in Gaza and Rachel & Yuval for speaking truth to power.”
Tamari, one of the organizers, said she felt it was “actually very disrespectful” for images of wounded and killed Oct. 7 victims to be shown in public.
Moshe Kayam, an Israeli-American who demonstrated in solidarity with the “NAZA” filmmakers on Saturday, said IAC’s rally was “doing a disservice” because the Oct. 7 attacks were indeed “horrendous,” but “did not justify the mass killing” of civilians in Gaza.
“We want the truth to come out,” Kayam said of the film. “We want everyone to see what really happened there, and the damage that it caused to Gaza, to Israel’s image and to us as Israelis.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post ‘NAZA’ documentary draws sold-out crowd – and protests – at US premiere appeared first on The Forward.
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Ari Emanuel has written a memoir and no one is safe — not even his brother
Roll the Calls: A Memoir
By Ari Emanuel
Knopf, 432 pages, $35
It must be exhausting to be super-agent Ari Emanuel: rising before dawn for a workout regimen, ingesting live worms to consume bacteria, and then placing hundreds of daily phone calls to clients and network honchos. It is, frankly, exhausting just to read about it, notwithstanding the clever, staccato narrative by (uncredited) ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer.
The point of it all, Emanuel keeps insisting in Roll the Calls, is not the dollars.
“Money isn’t the thing that makes me get up at 4:00 a.m.,” he says. “I’m just not sure yet what that thing is.”
Perpetually on the precipice of bankruptcy, he takes bold entrepreneurial risks to survive in an industry wracked by labor discontent, cutthroat infighting and technological change.
The goal, if there is one, seems to be simply to win — to bend everyone around him to his will. And, for the most part, he does. From the mailroom, Emanuel has ascended to the summit: executive chair and CEO of TKO and executive chairman of WME Group, “two companies,” his biographical blurb says, “that sit at the center of sports, entertainment and culture.”
Emanuel is probably best known as the model for the abrasive Ari Gold, the talent agent played by Jeremy Piven in the HBO show Entourage (2004-11). The show’s protagonist, Vincent Chase, is loosely based on one of Emanuel’s clients, the actor Mark Wahlberg. Emanuel says that he could never bear to watch the series, but notes that it helped turbocharge his career.
In his telling, the entertainment-industrial complex is a transactional, amoral, brutish and (though Emanuel doesn’t use this phrase) testosterone-fueled world, where the key players are nearly all men. It seems impossible to imagine any woman getting away with — let alone prospering from — the unhinged, profanity-laced approach that has become Emanuel’s trademark.
Even in this milieu, there are, in his view, particularly loathsome players. Among them is Harvey “Scissorhands” Weinstein, whom Emanuel indicts for his slovenliness, bullying tactics and editorial interference. Even without a mention of the producer’s alleged track record of sexual harassment and assault, Emanuel’s assessment of Weinstein is withering. “Empty at his core,” Emanuel writes, “Harvey’s sole motivation is to thwart and mess with other people.”
Emanuel expresses contempt, too, for other bold-faced names, including Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chair of Walt Disney Studios and cofounder of the film studio DreamWorks, and Hollywood scribe Nikki Finke, with whom Emanuel had a codependent relationship. He takes on Donald Trump as a client, doesn’t vote for him for president, and drops him, without regret, when he wins and can no longer generate commissions. None of this necessarily makes Emanuel a reliable narrator.
The memoir begins with the word “rage,” which Emanuel observes is also the first word of Homer’s Iliad. The allusion sets Roll the Calls up to be similarly epic. But its angry protagonist is, at best, an antihero, and the stakes of his success surely are less than mythic.
What are the origins of Emanuel’s rage? He points to his lifelong struggles with dyslexia and the bullying and humiliation that resulted. The Emanuel family ethos was unsparingly competitive. In life, he learned, “loser gets fed to lions,” so “keep your fists clenched and your head on a swivel.” And roughhousing with his older brothers, whom he jokingly calls “two violent psychopaths,” may have left Ari bruised and resentful.
Both Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, a prominent oncologist and bioethicist, and former Chicago mayor and prospective 2028 Democratic presidential candidate Rahm Emanuel are known for their combative personalities. Ari suggests that the family is tight-knit and loving. But one of the book’s quietly shocking reveals is Rahm’s mockery of his brother’s dyslexia when they share a stage during Chicago Ideas Week.
Emanuel argues that his anger, which can turn threatening, provides a bargaining advantage by intimidating adversaries. He cites a study showing “that angry negotiators had the edge.” In a bar, he calls out Michael Moore as an [expletive deleted] antisemite for views the director expressed about Israel; Moore denies the charge, they keep talking and Emanuel ends up with a new client.
“You’ve got to be a little psychotic in this town,” Emanuel argues. To succeed, “you need to show that you can color outside the lines, and that, once in a while, you might eat the [expletive deleted] crayon.” The memoir doesn’t delete the expletives.
Yet Emanuel understands the personal costs of his anger enough to have devoted years to psychotherapy aimed at moderating it. (The results seem mixed at best.) Emanuel also admits to a habit akin to stalking: calling potential clients, business partners and others constantly until they succumb to his sales pitch.
This incessant hounding landed him the mailroom gig at Creative Artists Agency, from which he quickly rose — until he departed, with allies, to start his own company. Similar persistence won him the business (and, later, friendship) of the famously curmudgeonly Larry David, who said, over lunch, that he would sign with Emanuel — if only the agent would stop calling.
After his first marriage (unsurprisingly) dissolved, Emanuel deployed his telephone tactics in courtship — not a method, one imagines, that would have worked for a lesser man. In Emanuel’s case, relentless pursuit led, after some drama and heartbreak, to his second marriage, to a much younger woman who had initially resisted his overtures.
None of this is to say that Roll the Calls isn’t worth a read, especially for anyone interested in an unabashedly jaundiced insider account of how Hollywood operates. The book is quick-paced, laugh-out-loud funny at times, and filled with acidic observations and gossip. It is also horrifying.
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